Awesome Writing Quotations From Jan-June 2012

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
Richard Bach

Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed.
Ray Bradbury

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true - hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it.
Ray Bradbury

If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business, because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Ray Bradbury

If you enjoy living, it is not difficult to keep the sense of wonder.
Ray Bradbury

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
Walter Bagehot

Far better to live your own path imperfectly than to live another’s perfectly.
Bhagavad Gita

I suspect that every teacher hears the same complaints, but that, being seldom a practicing author, he tends to dismiss them as out of his field, or to see in them evidence that the troubled student has not the true vocation. Yet it is these very pupils who are most obviously gifted who suffer from these disabilities, and the more sensitively organized they are the higher the hazard seems to them. Your embryo journalist or hack writer seldom asks for help of any sort; he is off after agents and editors while his more serious brother-in-arms is suffering the torments of the damned because of his insufficiencies. Yet instruction in writing is oftenest aimed at the oblivious tradesman of fiction, and the troubles of the artist are dismissed or overlooked.
Dorothea Brande

It may be that the root of the trouble is youth and humility. Sometimes it is self-consciousness that stems the flow. Often it is the result of misapprehensions about writing, or it arises from an embarrassment of scruples: the beginner may be waiting for the divine fire of which he has heard to glow unmistakably, and may believe that it can only be lighted by a fortuitous spark from above. The particular point to be noted just here is that this difficulty is anterior to any problems about story structure or plot building and that unless the writer can be helped past it there is very likely to be no need for technical instruction at all.
Dorothea Brande

The grain of truth in the fin de siècle notion, though, is this: the author of genius does keep till his last breath the spontaneity, the ready sensitiveness, of a child, the ‘innocence of eye’ that means so much to the painter, the ability to respond freshly and quickly to new scenes, and to old scenes as though they were new; to see traits and characteristics as though each were new-minted from the hand of God instead of sorting them quickly into dusty categories and pigeonholing them without wonder or surprise; to feel situations so immediately and keenly that the word ‘trite’ hardly has any meaning for him; and always to see ‘the correspondences between things’ [I’ll write about this soon] of which Aristotole spoke two thousand years ago. This freshness of response is vital to the author’s talent.
Dorothea Brande

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
Albert Camus

That's not writing, that's typing.
Truman Capote (on Jack Kerouac)

With time and patience, the mulberry leaf becomes satin. With time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown.
Chinese Proverb

From now on, ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
Winston Churchill

If suffering brought wisdom, the dentist’s office would be full of luminous ideas.
Mason Cooley

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan, 'press on' has solved, and always will solve, the problems of the human race.
Calvin Coolidge

If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down seventy times and get up off the floor saying. "Here comes number seventy-one!"
Richard M. Devos

I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Joan Didion

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.
Albert Einstein

‎Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Albert Einstein

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein

Imagination is more important than knowledge
Albert Einstein

I try to write parts for women that are as complicated and interesting as women actually are.
Nora Ephron

I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech.
Nora Ephron

I am continually fascinated at the difficulty intelligent people have in distinguishing what is controversial from what is merely offensive.
Nora Ephron

If you wish to be a writer; write!
Epictetus

[Hemingway] has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
William Faulkner (on Hemingway--who has a return quote you should check out)

You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.
F Scott Fitzgerald

How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?
Charles De Gaulle

If you want to be a writer, write.
Neil Gaiman

The muscles of writing are not so visible, but they are just as powerful: determination, attention, curiosity, a passionate heart.
Natalie Goldberg

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward; they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.
Goethe

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.
Robert Graves

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?
Ernest Hemingway (on Faulkner--who has a return quote if you didn't see it)

When a thought takes one's breath away, a grammar lesson seems an impertinence.
Thomas W. Higginson

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard

I think it's brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.
Steve Jobs

My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.
James Joyce

A good deal of literary criticism serves only to reinforce a caste system which is as old as the intellectual snobbery which nurtured it.
Stephen King

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
Stephen King

While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad one, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.
Stephen King

Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work and enriching your own life as well,.  It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over.  Getting happy, okay?  Getting happy.
Stephen King

Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
Robert MacNeil

There’s only us, There’s only this, Forget regret, Or life is your to miss.
Mimi, Rent

Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.
Moliere

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.
David Nicholls

We have art in order not to die of the truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Alfred North

People who say they like to write but do not like to read are like people who say they only like to exhale.
D. de la Perriere (an instructor who may have been quoting someone else; I'm not sure)

A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.
Edgar Allan Poe

The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.
Edwin Schlossberg

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.
David Sedaris

Blue cheese contains natural amphetamines. Why are students not informed about this?
Mark E. Smith

I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.
Rex Stout

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.
Jesse Stuart

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.  How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?  For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone.  That is where the writer scores over his fellows:  he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.
Vita Sackville-West

Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck.
Joss Whedon

People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.
Joss Whedon

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.
E. B. White

You must want to enough. Enough to take all the rejections, enough to pay the price of disappointment and discouragement while you are learning. Like any other artist you must learn your craft—then you can add all the genius you like.
Phyllis A. Whitney

[Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
Virginia Woolf (about Ulysses)

So you see, imagination needs moodling - long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering.
Brenda Ueland

Sunday Prompts--Recombine, Reconfigure, Reconstruct

Not exactly what I.....
Eh, you know what?  That works just fine.

Here are a few prompts for this evening. I picked these based on some of the ideas going on in the blog this week. Don't forget that these are JUST exercises, and most importantly don't forget to HAVE FUN!!

Prompt 1- Let's work on writing what you know without everything needing to be completely autobiographical. Think of an event in your life that was intensely emotional (good or bad). Now remove yourself from this event and place another person who is very different from you in your place.  I'm not talking Mr. Bean or Ed Grimly or something but like and actually genuine, but very different person.  The more changes you can make, the better. Change the gender, the class, the education...whatever. They are having the same emotional reaction that you did, but they will express their reaction based on who they are as a person. Here's the catch--you may not simply state their feelings. If you use first person, they can't wax emotional about how they feel. You have to show through their actions and words. (And you might want to avoid having them cry--it's a lot less effective in fiction than it is on TV/film.) Use lots of visceral details. This can be as long or as short as you want, but try to push yourself to write at least a page.

Prompt 2- Imagine your current favorite character (or yourself) in a situation they've (you've) never been in. This doesn't have to be a supernatural or speculative situation, although it could be. The trick is to imagine something with a different emotional core than what you have personally experienced. If you've been to a funeral, having a funeral on the moon is probably not going to be sufficiently new. Try to think of things that would be emotionally unique. (Death of a loved one, marriage, divorce or a huge break up, having a child--though many people have experienced all these things--would be the kind of thing I'm thinking of.) Now imagine what experiences you have had and their aspects that might help you write about the moment you have chosen. Make a list. (If you picked a funeral of a loved one you might something like "1- The time I attended my friend's dads funeral--for visceral details. 2-The sudden break up with Hanna Tompkins--for the sense of loss and grief. Etc..." You can actually write up the scene if you want, but the exercise here is just to consciously consider how you would use the experiences you HAVE had to recombine and reconfigure into an experience you haven't had.

Prompt 3- Look around you. It's probably just pretty ordinary stuff unless you happen to enjoy reading W.A.W. in exotic locations (in which case put the computer down and enjoy the exotic). Find one detail around you something beautiful that isn't supposed to be. The way the light shimmers off an empty soda can, or the way a power cord looks like a serpent attacking the Dust Off can of air, or the way a pile of clothes says more about the person you love than a sonnet. See that thing not as ordinary you, but as artist you--the person inside of you that can see beauty in its opposite. Write about this in extremely sensory language for no more than a paragraph (about 300 words max). Try to describe what you see (or hear, or smell, or are experiencing from a new perspective), and avoid describing how it makes you feel.

Stale Fortune Cookies

Fortune cookie wisdom from the past.

They might be a little stale, some are clearly other advice that I've only reworded, and the worst part is that adding "in bed" doesn't always work. Plus many of them would require fortune cookies as big as your fist and/or writing you need a magnifying glass to see in order to actually fit in a cookie.

But here they are....

I October 2012
II December 2012
III January 2013
IV June 2013
V November 2013
VI March 2014
VII May 2014
VIII July 2014
IX March 2015
X August 2015
XI October 2015
XII March 2017
XIII June 2017
XIV October 2017
XV May 2018
XVI September 2018
XVII June 2019
XVIII July 2020

Quick State of the Blog

W.A.W. has plateaued at about 45-55 page views per day.

That means that just about every person I count as friend, who isn't absolutely bored by the idea of writing, is currently reading. So...thank you and cheers! I reiterate my strong encouragement that if you know anyone else who might like W.A.W., please point them my way. Of course, even that number is only once I account for the weird sites that send me traffic like online pharmacies and what I can only assume is spam designed to get people like me to click on the link BACK to their site. (I say something like "Why is there a link to W.A.W. from this weird URL." Then I click to see what the URL is. And then my anti-virus does something not entirely unlike the quarantine procedures from Monsters Inc.)

I hope the readership goes up, but I know it's not the kind of blog with mass appeal. There are probably a few things I can do to generate traffic, but I wouldn't want to do them before I was cruising at 50,000 ft. anyway, and right now it seems like I'm still getting the "ground floor" set up. Getting a million readers now might be sort of like walking into a big crowded gala with my fly down.

I might need to restructure things (again). So everyone get your Dilbert REORG hats out!

Here's the skinny. After those first few weeks where I kind of felt like I was passing a kidney stone every time I put a post up, I noticed that most blogs have much shorter entries. I mentioned shorter entries, and more than a couple of people said, "Yes plx kthxbai." (Which is valuable input, and thanks for not just kicking The Blog's vociferous butt to the curb.) I don't want to post as much, and I'm sure you don't want to read an opus a day.

I'm trying to pare down the entry length to something bite sized, and it'll probably shrink even more than it has this last week as I find the sweet spot, but this means when I have ten or fifteen pages worth of thoughts rattling around like "What We Talk About When We Talk About Writing" it's going to end up getting spread out over weeks. I'm already down to a two page max, and that seems like it's still a little un-bite-size-y. I'm not going to apologize too much for having writing in a blog about writing, but I feel like a page and a half might be a better fit.

That probably means I'm going to tweak the schedule a little. The idea posting nothing but one article for two or three weeks because I'm only posting it a page or two at a time, gives me hives. What if you don't LIKE that post. Maybe you'll get bored and start seeing other blogs. Maybe there will be dinner with the other blogs. Maybe you'll reach across the table, and say "I've never felt this way about a blog before." And then I'm going to have to go crazy and boil rabbits, and it's all bad. So be ready to see the schedule change a bit next week. I'll probably still do "meaty" writing on M/W/F. I just might run my series posts on a specific day.

Potpourri should be up in a half hour or so.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Writing Part-3

Sponging

“So what’s your story about?” I ask.

“Oh it’s about this TOTALLY insane party,” Willbehuge says, “and this guy who gets so totally wasted on weed and jello shots. And he’s, like, wandering around, looking for his girlfriend but he can’t find her. And there’s all these really fucked up things going on like people going down on each other RIGHT THERE and stuff. And then he finds out she sneaked off to one of the bedrooms. With another GIRL! Isn’t that just insane?”

“Is it autobiographical?” I ask.

“Well, I mean…yeah. But I totally write it in third person, so I can describe what happens in the bedroom.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I can’t decide if I should have the guy join them or not. I mean…I totally did in real life, totally—I’m not even lying—but, I mean, I want it to be realistic.”

“A plot might not hurt either.”

“What do you mean...?”

When a high school or college student is talking about prewriting, they’re doing things like “talking with your partner for five minutes” or “making an idea wheel.” This is great if you are writing an expository essay on something you haven’t thought much about before, and expository writers may even continue using some of these techniques. However, I must admit that I shudder to think of some PhD drawing little circles in colored pencils with main ideas written in them before pounding out a literary essay for a peer reviewed journal. It’s just too horrible to contemplate.

For a fiction writer, things are a little different. Prewriting might involve having written a similar thing before, having a life experience, months of research, reading extensively, and of course doing stuff...as a writer. That’s why we’re going to call this “sponging” instead of prewriting because it’s part of a larger mosaic of what might loosely be called prewriting. If it helps you to think of this as a protracted form of prewriting, go right ahead, but I might make a few jokes about calcium deposits in your brain.

I returned to college at thirty, and I had to work to pay the bills, so I wasn’t able to take 15 units a semester and knock it out in four years like some of my classmates. I also wasn’t out on my own for the first time in my life. By the time I got through junior college and was sitting in my creative writing classes, I was in there with people literally half my age. And while they were fun to look at—especially in boots—and especially in skirts and boots—their writing often focused on their own penultimate experiences, which involved things like drugs and getting drunk. They thought it was very edgy to have their characters get high and say fuck a lot—some even (*gasp*) wrote about kissing same sex partners and the funny feelings that gave them in the pants. Oh my. The risqué edginess of it all. (It’s best if you read the last sentence like Ben Stein.) Mostly though, the instructors, me, and the one other returning student in the class would get glassy eyed whenever someone shared one of these stories. Not that there aren’t great stories about getting drunk and high and kissing same sex people, but they don’t rely just on the shock value to be interesting. These things don’t shock people over about 23 because they’re old news. I’ve been to Burning Man; in order to even get me to BLINK, your story would have to be about taking a wrong turn because you’re too high off a Hippy Flip to think straight, and walking into a tent with a full-blown gay orgy, and having a man insist on massaging your package while he gives you directions to where you are actually trying to go.

The problem is that most instructors don’t really understand how to deal with this type. Somewhere between "Get over yourself!" and "This isn't actually a STORY," is what I think they want to say, but they don't quite know how to articulate it nicely. They end up giving crap advice like “Go live life!", thinking that by twenty-five this shit should be out of the students' systems; however, this is forgetting that their job is to teach writing instead of passing judgement on content and that there are marvelous examples of great fiction about washing dishes or cleaning the house or any one of a dozen things that a ten-year-old will have experienced, never mind a twenty-year-old. Plus this turns into recursive process because twenty year olds have this blind spot where hearing the words “live life” gets translated into “party like it’s 1999!” The 20 year old who hears, “this is blasé; go live a little” thinks, “Shit, what do I have to do, get hooked on heroin?? Well okay then...”

What the instructors aren’t sharing is that it isn’t the events that are important. The student needs to return to life with the tools of a writer and soak in life from that entirely new perspective. Yes, we may have to wait to have our first real break up, or the first death that really hits us where we live. But these experiences don’t MAKE us good writers; they merely enrich the perceptions of those who already are.

Fortunately Dorothea Brande can come to our rescue (again). You don’t have to have particularly extreme experiences, you just have to have them while absorbing the world as a writer. You don’t need to scale Kilimanjaro, become a raging alcoholic, or have a threesome on crack cocaine...while driving a jet plane...into a mountain...with bears...with lasers...in order to have “experienced life” and thus be ready to write. What you have to do is be like a sponge, soaking up the world from a writer’s point of view. No one cares about another college freshman at their first frat party, but a writer can make that a literary masterpiece. Pulling a poignant moment from something banal or finding beauty in its opposite is why we read writers—we delight in their ability to see the world from a completely different perspective. That’s why artists are so WEIRD!! And that’s why we love them. We revel in how they make us look at something we’ve passed a thousand times a day with a sense of beauty and wonder. Yes, we will probably read someone’s account of their Russian Roulette orgy atop of Mt. Everest while having their teeth pulled without Novocain and fighting Ugandan rebels. We will read that because it’s a new perspective on life. A party with “hella weed” is not a new perspective on life.

However, what a good writer can do is create that same sense of wonder from the Everest dental slaughter orgy while their character is doing nothing more interesting than cleaning out a cat box. THAT is what you have to do. Go absorb the world through a writer’s eye. Sponge every last detail up and look for things no one else can see in the most ordinary of circumstances.
This is basically the thing I’m always going on about here that I like to call “Doing shit...as a writer.” Working in cannery isn’t interesting. But John Steinbeck made it a masterpiece. You don’t have to go work in a cannery to be a writer, but you do have to experience the world through a writer’s eyes and sponge up the experiences. You can work a manual labor job as a writer. Go to a party as a writer. Watch a movie as a writer. Virtually anything you can do, you can also do it by walking into the situation like a big writer sponge. As you accumulate these moments, you become better prepared when you sit down to write something. You collect a pool of meaningful experiences to draw on that can be reconfigured, recombined, and redesigned to fit what you are doing.

Now, I want to warn you…you are coming close to a place that is strong with the Dark Side of the writer-force. Be careful you must. You can do things as a writer that will make you a better writer, including watch movies and stuff, but a writer deals in words. A writer deals in the combinations of words and the reorganization of those twenty-six letters that create beauty and meaning. Your universe is words. So even though you can derive intense benefit as a writer from watching a movie or TV, if for one moment you think that you can become a good writer by ONLY watching movies and TV go back and read the last part of this essay until such wanton stupidity is expunged from your brain. I see a lot of young writers trying this. They don’t read much and instead basically just watch TV. Guess how much good writing they’ve done? Did you guess none? You have learned. You may learn something about dialogue, dramatic tension, characterization, plot arcs, and these are good lessons to learn. But writers peddle in words, not imagery and sound, so those lessons are lost if you can’t convert them seamlessly into language. They are lost if you don’t know what WORDS will put those lessons to the page. Watching a movie “as a writer” is not your “out” for reading. Read you must young Jedi writer.

Once you get really good at doing this “...as a writer” stuff, you can actually comb back through old memories and reevaluate them with that lens. You can make that first kiss tingle the top of your readers’ scalp like the touch of a dozen tiny fingers, or make your readers feel the pain of teen-age rejection burning at the pit of their stomach like they swallowed a hot stone. Common experiences become extraordinary in a writer’s hands. It takes training that part of you for a good long while in your moment-by-moment existence, but as it becomes second nature to look around the world and notice things that would make for good writing, you can then plug that rubric in as you sift through the memory trunks of your own mind for moments from your past. Now you’re cooking with gas!

The reason this is like prewriting is that each of these memories and events experienced is like a Lego block. Each is a small piece of something bigger that can be recombined and reconfigured to build a moment entirely different from the one it came from. A bit of heartache, some rejection, a sense of loss, and you can describe a break up even though you’ve married your high school sweetheart. Once you get enough blocks your bucket, you can think of any moment, and all you have to do is build it. You don’t need to have lived the fall of the Narkarnian Battlecruiser Fleet to describe it in a way that puts a lump in a reader’s throat. You don’t need to have slain dragons to get a reader’s heart pounding through the scene. You don’t NEED to experience a plane crashing into a mountain of ill tempered bears to have lived enough to write. You can create a world scintillating kinds of details that can slice eyeballs and pierce eardrums once you’ve sponged enough.

This is why sponging is much like a long period of prewriting. Once you’ve done enough of it, you may be able to sit down and write, right off the cuff about something—even something you’ve never personally experienced. It’s also why writers never stop sponging in much the same way people rarely stop collecting Lego blocks. It's why they enjoy new experiences. It's the writer equivalent of getting a new pack with the specially designed folding wing piece. And this is what instructors are trying to say when they say "live life. "Go collect more damned Legos. You're trying to build a Star Destroyer with nine blocks and a flat piece." It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write until this point—there’s lots to be said for training and practice. But it does mean sometimes you might find you don’t quite have the right sized Lego block for what you’re trying to do. That’s where the beauty of those who’ve gone before you comes in because you can always do research, which is its own form of prewriting. [One that I will cover on Monday.]

Readinate the Countryside (Thursday's Three)

On the theme of reading discussed yesterday, here are a few gems just for you. This probably won't be the last thing I say on reading being as fundamental to writing as actually writing is, but people who don't GET that are actually more common than you might think.

People who say they like to write but do not read are like people who say they only ever exhale.

D. de la Perriere (an instructor who may have been quoting someone else; I'm not sure)

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

Stephen King (On Writing)

I still can't decide which is more fun - reading or writing.

Rex Stout



I need to get back to reading. I read about three to four hours most days, but lately it's only been one or two, and I miss it. The past month or so has been all about W.A.W.--getting links and things things set up, learning about all the blogging tools that I didn't know before, learning my limits, learning YOUR limits, and of course a little bit of glittering New Relationship Energy. I'm glad that I'm finally finding a rhythm here to give me more time to read and write on other things.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Writing Part-2

Part 1

Part 2- The Shoulders of Giants

So now that you know writing is a process, what IS the process? I’m not just going to regurgitate the Flower/Hayes cognitive model at you, although I do think prewriting, drafting, peer review, revising, and editing are important. The problem is this is designed mostly for teaching undergraduate academic composition. But just to be clear about it, if you were a student in one of my 98 classes I would be swinging from the overhead projectors like a rabid monkey and jamming sparklers up my ass if I thought it would help you get your attention long enough to learn those five terms, so you don’t sit down and write a paper from start to finish in the three hours before class...so I wouldn’t say it’s useless either.

The trouble with codifying this process so discretely is that it’s mostly designed to help college students write a paper—an expository essay that probably has a thesis and some topic sentences and stuff and so if you’re doing that you might say to yourself, “Okay, self. I am now done with my pre-writing. What is the next step in the writing process.” It’s also probably designed to help people who haven’t written before not to end up having an “episode” with their hands wrapped around their dorm-mate’s ADD medication and blithering something about “Youth in Asia.” For most writers this would be—in the words of Jeffery Rush—“more like GUIDELINES.” While writers will do these things, they almost always express themselves as individually as the the writers themselves.

A creative writer might seem to do almost no prewriting, but then if you look more closely, you will find that they just wrote a short story based on another piece they did five years ago and that it’s about this topic they’ve been thinking about for five years. So really, they DID do some prewriting. They’re just a long way from idea wheels, T graphs, and “Okay class, let’s free write for TEN minutes about abortion! YAY!!”

Another example would be revision. Someone under deadline like a journalist learns to revise as their writing. When they finish, their “revision” usually consists of running their eyes down the pagew while they say: “Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmyeahlooksgood.” That doesn’t mean they didn’t turn in good copy. It means they have learned their craft well enough to do that aspect of writing almost instantly--often so quickly that it happens within their head as the words are forming. Their reflexes with writing are SO fast they boarder on precognition--they are the Spidermen (and Spiderwomen) of the writing world. "My journalist sense is tingling--oh, I was about to write an adverb!" By contrast a creative writer has different demands and may need to completely rewrite something multiple times.

Also as a writer develops personally, these steps become more organic; they bleed together and mix into a recursive goulash. Some writers (like me) like to sit down and do some revision to get them in the mood of writing before they generate new content. Some pour out new drafts when they’re in emotional phases in their lives and go back and revise them when they’re in intellectual phases. Kurt Vonnegut would rewrite every single page over and over again, until that ONE page was exactly what he wanted, and then go on to the next page.

So it’s not like that model isn't useful...we just need to be sure we give a lot of latitude for different kinds of writing, and understand that Writing About Writing is a blog that focuses on creative writing and specifically fiction. I don’t want all my tech writer friends to hire a prostitute to lure me out into the alley for a a quickie, only to find that what is really going to happen is the “Tech Writers Represent” smack down. (If any of you would like to chime in on what the process looks like to you, that would be awesome.) I also think that as metacognition, it’s specifically limiting in a few key ways—used primarily in high school and college, this model assumes a certain amount of process has already gone on, and I’ll be damned if that part doesn’t need to be spelled out explicitly. It also seems to be designed mostly to get you to the end of writing an essay with a grade that doesn’t suck. That’s not really the goal of real writers.

So here is my somewhat altered writing process for the real writer with emphasis on the creative fiction writer:

Reading

“Hey so what do you like writing?” I ask my next-seat-neighbor.

“Mostly sci-fi and fantasy,” Willbehuge answers. “I totally have three sci-fi books already written. And I'm writing this fantasy epic that I think will be six books--or maybe eight if I milk it. I just need to finish this degree, go clean them up a little, and then I’m good to go to find an agent.”

“Oh cool,” I say. “Me too. Well, not with the practically ready manuscripts. Mine need major revisions, but I like sci-fi and fantasy. Well, I kind of like the classics more than contemporary stuff, but any time there’s a really GOOD sci-fi or fantasy book I am in heaven. Have you read any Murakame?”

“Who?” Willbehuge asks.

“Sputnik Sweetheart, 1Q84, Wind Up Bird…”

“Never heard of him,”

I blink. “Oh…well, I guess he can be a little esoteric sometimes. How about Le Guin?”

“Who?”

This time, when I blink, my eyes have to shift for a moment into anime so that they can be in one of those strange letterboxes with JUST my eyes and make that WK-CHK WK-CHK noise as it happens. “Ursala Le Guin. Probably the best science fiction writer since Orwell. Disposessed. Lathe of Heaven. Left Hand of Darkness.”

“I think I saw Lathe of Heaven as a movie,” Willbehuge says. “It had that dude from Willard in it.”

“Okay," I say starting to feel like I'm in the cheese shop skit. "How about George Martin?

Blank stare.

“Song of Ice and Fire? Probably the best fantasy series since Lord of the Rings? ”

“I don’t really read much, to tell you the truth. I’m not that into it.”

WK-CHK WK-CHK

You think I’m kidding. Or maybe you’ve actually been in a Creative Writing program, and you know the horrifying truth that I’m not. Half to 75 percent of my class didn’t like reading. These are people who think they are writers, want to be writers, dream of being writers and admit quite openly that they don’t like reading. Most just flat out say it, and even though I heard it over and over again, it always just stunned me. The conversation I just showed you happened—with little variation—no less than six times in the three years I was there.

These people are completely baffling to me. People going into film don’t NOT watch movies. Actors don’t avoid seeing plays. Musicians don’t express that they’re not really that into music. And no one would take someone so narcissistic as to only produce this art, without absorbing it, seriously for a moment. What the in the name of Zues’s BUTTHOLE makes so many writers that don’t like reading like they somehow don't have anything to do with each other.

Actually I think there IS an answer. This is my personal, anecdotal, not-supported-by-my-local-sociology-department theory. Writing is the one art form almost everyone knows how to do with a fair degree of proficiency. It’s the one art form that pretty much every high school graduate has trained in for about twelve years. Think about it--you have to go to a special school to get that much training in any other art form. In a world where everyone wants to do the talk show circuit and be rich and famous, suddenly the DREAMS of being a famous something bubble up. No garage band? Too shy to act? Never were much of a painter? How about writing? You can do that! So it becomes this...magnet. Like all the miscellaneous delusions of grandeur file themselves under "writer." And when you realize how many people have a book idea in their head or a couple of chapters tucked away or really think someday they’re going to scribble out a bestseller, you can feel very cold and lonely also having the same delusions. But believe me when I tell you that if you are actually writing, and reading, you have it all on these guys. These people know how to write like most people know how to sing along with the radio. It doesn't make them Andrea Bocelli. It means they’re literate and they like the IDEA of being a writer. Don’t worry about them. You do what you love, and let them have their garage band that is “totally gonna make it!” Check back with them when they're thirty-five, have two kids and a career and ask them how it's going. You'll feel much better. No REALLY.

Because here’s the insane thing. Most of them don’t even like to WRITE. Seriously I sat next to these people in every class I took. “Yeah, I don’t really do much writing except for class." "I haven't really written for fun since high school." They’re in a goddamned creative writing degree talking about how they don’t like to write very much. What. The. HELL???!!!!

The insane, but ubiquitous proclivity of writers who don't fricken read is why reading is on this list. Now you may be thinking to yourself that reading and writing are different skills. They’re different classes. You do them at different times. What’s wrong with this guy? He’s got to be stopped! Grab the pitchforks and torches. TONIGHT, WE DINE IN OAKLAND!!!

Slow down there, turbo. I can defend this argument. Besides, I think if we rethought the connection between reading and writing, we’d have fewer yahoos that think they’re going to be big, famous sci-fi writers without knowing who Le Guin is.

Now I know if you asked people if reading and writing are the same thing, you’ll get some funny looks, but guess what happens if you ask a writer how to be a good writer? Any writer? Anywhere? At any time? Ever? They will mention two things without fail. Oh sure, they will give you some advice. If you ask another writer, they’ll give you some different advice. Write in the morning. Write at night. Get up and dress for work before you write so you feel like it’s a real job. Write in the nude so you feel free. Write upside down with one of those astronaut pens so you're as uncomfortable as possible. Write in the most ergonomically perfect position so you can do it for hours. Write from the heart. Write from an outline. Write only when you have something to say. Write to figure out what is in your heart. Write in black ink. Never write in black ink. Never write about kids. Kids make great fodder. Never write about alcoholics. Alcoholism is a rich topic. Never write about ethics. Dude are you actually TRYING to completely dismiss Russian lit?

Well, you get the idea.

But here’s what you’re going to notice after you’re done giggling at the process of ritual/fetish focused writers who think they aren’t really good writers but their special pen is doing all the work because Edgar Allen Poe touched it once, and Gary Gygax used it to sign a fan’s t-shirt. As you look down your list, all these writers will not have agreed on anything. Not that water is wet or the color of the sky, and especially not about what it takes to be a good writer.

With two exceptions.

Suddenly, these writers who agree on almost nothing, agree on these two things. Every single one of them will have mentioned these two things. Write a lot. Read a lot.

All writers read. Every one of them. I’m not just talking about creative fiction writers. Tech writers. Academic writers. Professional writers. Journalists. All of them read like mad crazy. They all have 1337 reading skills that you wouldn’t believe. And now I’m going to tell you one of the worst kept secrets of all of writerdom that somehow continues to need to be screamed from a megaphone into the ears of every young writer: those that read the most...write the best. Almost without fail or question. And while some writers read far less than others, almost any successful writer reads a lot. A tech writer might not read a lot of fiction, and a journalist might not read much beyond other journalists, but it is impossible to become sensitive to what is good writing without reading, and reading a lot. You have to have that practice seeing the difference between good and bad writing, and it’s not something you can sit down and do in an afternoon. It takes developing an ear. It takes reading great writing. It takes reading horrible writing. It takes reading enough that the difference between great and horrible is something you can intuit within your own words.

Joe and Jane Averagehead can pick up a writing instrument and write without reading a lot. They can write a competent piece of prose. But anyone who wants to be a serious writer, certainly anyone who wants to move others with their writing or scratch out a living with creative forms, must read. They must read like words are water, sipping and drinking deeply throughout every single day.

Reading is as much a part of the writing process as learning the alphabet. Writers read so much that a casual observer wouldn’t be able to tell if books or oxygen were more important to them. Maybe people want to say that it is an extremely open ended way to look at prewriting or something, but it desperately, desperately needs to be said over and over and over again. Reading is part of the writing process. And skipping this part of the process makes for some extremely mediocre writing.

Writers read.